Hot? You Aren’t Alone — The Past Year Has Been America’s Warmest On Record

Climate-change doubters can continue to deny it's happening, but the facts don't lie: the National Climatic Data Center reports that in the US, the past year has been the warmest since record-keeping began more than a century ago.

That doesn't even include the heatwave recently experienced by much of the country when some 2,100 high temperature marks were either broken or tied.

But the report does mention that states like Colorado, which had its warmest June ever and a spate of devastating wildfires, are experiencing extreme to exceptional drought.

"There are a lot of things going on that have been very unusual over the last several months," said Dev Niyogi, earth and atmospheric sciences professor at Purdue University, adding that while it's "very hard to root out" how short-term weather patterns play into longer-term trends, "they're all tied together" and can contribute to major issues

A March report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change noted that "climate change has led to changes in climate extremes such as heat waves, record high temperatures and, in many regions, heavy precipitation in the past half-century."

In the last half of June alone, 170 all-time temperature records were matched or broken across the mainland US, including 113-degree temperatures in South Carolina and 112-degree recordings in Georgia -- both of which, if verified, would be the hottest days ever recorded in those states.